


Veal Cutlets Tomato

by larvae



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Body Horror, Coda, Corpse Desecration, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Episode s01e06 Coda, Episode: s01e06 A Mercy, Fingering, Gore, Necrophilia (kind of), Other, Stream of Consciousness, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-19 22:47:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16543769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/larvae/pseuds/larvae
Summary: Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.Cornelius Hickey finger fucks Pte. William Heather's exposed brain.





	Veal Cutlets Tomato

The sheet draped from the headboard of Private William Heather’s sickbed came away from his peaceful face like a bridal veil. Hickey — as he had grown used to calling himself by now, even in the continuous private monologue that drove him to this place — folded it away gently, with the trembling anticipation of a bridegroom come to bestow his affections.

Was the meat of a man truly so meager even at the core of him? The sum total of any human achievement bundled up in this same or some other parcel of tightly coiled pink flesh? It gleamed sick and slick in the guttering candlelight, entirely alien and completely unremarkable. Exposed to the elements as it was it seemed shameful, like the nakedness of Eve. Like her nakedness it was perverse for the awareness of it. Hadn’t it always been there behind his eyes? Piloting his every waking moment, projecting his dreams onto the inner surface of his skull as if it were a great white sail? But to see it now, defenseless against the cold, useless as the pile of meat it rode on, was an aberration. 

Heather’s eyelids had been pressed closed with red wax to spare Stanley and Goodsir the abyss in his gaze which would gaze also into them. Hickey thought for a moment to break those seals with the pad of his thumb and feel the jelly give way beneath their shattered surface, no doubt beginning to rot now or else to recede deep into Heather’s sockets from disuse, the muscles that cradled them atrophying and the skin sinking into the pits of the death’s head it stretched over. He thought better of it.

Hickey, who had had his share of men split open before him, slick and wanting, had never yet taken part in anything half so obscene. He reached his hand up to Heather’s cracked skull, teasing at the lip of it with a fingertip and delighting to discover that it was no longer sharp. Somehow, the base mechanics of his body remained, knitting new skin over broken bone in a futile effort to keep on, to continue the trek, to live against any sense of common decency.

What was it that the tip of his finger pressed against now? A childhood memory? Fine motor control? Command over his bowels? Hickey delved back into his own grey matter to search his memories for the tiny script of a phrenology chart he had spied once, unveiling the secret divisions of an organ examining itself. Hickey caught the tip of his tongue between his teeth as he pressed in further, feeling his digit break the surface and push in to the first knuckle. It was cold, maddeningly cold or else cold when compounded with the constant, unyielding cold of the stale cabin air pressing in on every side and curling up through the crevices of the body in a vile, serpentine chill. It really was, as Dr. Stanley had remarked, like a pudding. Soft, yielding, sucking, not unlike the mysterious contents of the neatly labeled cans he and the rest of the men were served as rations. Is that what was in him even now? Is this what was experiencing the cold dead attentions of a newly made hole in an entity that mirrored it? Had the very notion of this venture bellow deck in the dead of night been birthed by a thing indistinguishable from veal cutlets tomato? Could it be that Heather’s veal cutlets swirled with the same manic delight as Hickey’s in this moment they shared? That his finger could probe through his stupor to reach whatever part of him which could still process the majesty of this moment, of Hickey’s mind reaching into a reflection of itself?

With his teeth still sunk deep into his tongue, his ragged breath pushing past it and out through his nose, Hickey thought to tease an angel’s lust from Mister Heather as he sank a second finger into his exposed brain, delighting in the squelch. Surely from this even the angels would avert their eyes, he thought as he added a third. The motion came naturally to him, though it seemed foreign to watch from this angle. Hickey fucked an open hole into Heather’s head with his steady hand, splaying his fingers as he pushed in and drawing them back together as he pulled out. For all his efforts the supine man receiving them hardly moved. The exposed tissue at Hickey’s mercy gave way without a second thought, crumbling to nothing under the duress of his affections.

He couldn’t be sure how much time had passed when at last the hole gaped open wide enough to satisfy him. Hickey felt certain, not in his grey matter but deep in his bones and his thews, that he had taken nothing from Mr. Heather of any consequence. The flesh stretched out before him was as barren as the wastes that stretched around him for a thousand thousand miles in every cardinal direction. This was a great wide nothing, a person shaped void into which he had put another. This was meat, cold and unfeeling, devoid of any higher humanity, and it had given way to his meat, virile and alive and cleverer than the rest of them by a generous mile.

Nothing had gazed back at Hickey as he had gazed into this. The monster in the abyss was his own reflection, turned on its head as if through daguerreotypy. With a wily little smile of private satisfaction, he wiped his hand across the Private’s lapel, replaced the modesty panel he had so cheekily removed, and made his way above deck.

**Author's Note:**

> A special thank you to @ravenousgrue ~


End file.
